Henry Lee Lucas has been called one of America's most prolific serial killers. Lucas's confessed to over three hundred crimes, the world will never know if he was telling the truth, however he still ranks as one of the worlds most corrupted serial killers.
On January 11, 1960 Lucas and his mother went to drink at a local bar. He and his mother began arguing about where Henry should live, they left the bar and began home still arguing. At one point his mother hit him with a broom and Lucas defended himself with a knife. Once the fight was over his mother was left dead from a fatal stab wound to the neck, after Lucas raped her corpse and left town. He was picked up by a Michigan state trooper and was prosecuted for her murder after the pocketknife he used to kill her was found in his pocket.
During the trial, Lucas’s childhood problems were reveled and his habits of killing small animals. The jurors sympathized with Lucas about his horrible conditions of his childhood, a verdict of second degree murder was given, he was send to Jackson State Penitentiary in south Michigan. Soon after being placed in jail, Lucas attempted suicide twice, and was placed in a mental facility. After ten years, he was released for parole despite telling a guard that he wasn’t ready to go and that he would kill again. Eighteen months later he was back in jail for molesting two teenage girls, he stayed in his old cell until he was thirty-nine and then was released in August of 1975.
Lucas became a drifter after being released and ended up in Jacksonville, Florida. There he met his soon to be partner Ottis Toole at a soup kitchen. They both moved into Toole’s mothers house where Lucas met Becky Powell, Toole’s cousin. Becky was diagnosed with slight mental retardation and thrived for the attention she got from Lucas. Lucas, Toole and Powell began to roam the interstates and soon ended up in Texas. While there, Lucas killed Kate Rich when he “got the urge to kill her and have sex with her body”. He killed her by stabbing her to death, and then dragging her across and oil field the raping her corpse and leaving it. Later that day, he went back to the field and brought the body home with him, then burned it in his stove to destroy the evidence. On August 23, 1982 Powell and Lucas left Texas to go back home to Florida, however that evening Lucas returned to Texas without Powell, she was never seen again. Later Lucas confessed to killing her in a field and stuffing her body parts into three pillowcases.
While arrangements for the Rich case were being made, Lucas confessed to killing a hundred women. Lucas was sentenced to seventy-five years in prison, after his confession police from across the nation called Montague County hoping that Lucas would solve many of their unsolved murders. Soon after being convicted for Rich’s murder, he was put on trial for Powell’s murder and was sentenced for life. After the trial Lucas began confessing to seventy-seven murders of women in nineteen different states, each description of the murders became more bazaar. The confessions included descriptions of dismemberment, necrophilia, and sometimes cannibalism by Toole. Toole backed up Lucas confessions by telling investigators that they picked up mostly hitchhikers and killed all of them. Toole was imprisoned in Florida but never convicted of the murder of Adam Walsh in Hollywood, Florida, he died of liver cancer in a prison in Florida.
Soon Lucas had confessed to over six hundred murders, however investigators discovered he had confessed to murders of people who were still alive and lies were told about the way some were killed. One such case when Lucas told investigators that he and Toole were apart of the cult Hands of Death, however this was untrue and proved so by officials leading them to doubt the number of confessions Lucas said. It has been said that officials fed Lucas details of crimes so that they could close the cases; however, Lucas retracted his confessions when he became a born again Christian. Lucas said that he only killed his mother, Powell, and Rich and that he confessed to the others to embarrass the law enforcement. One murder that was supposedly solved because of Lucas’s confessions was Orange Socks, a prostitute hitchhiker in Texas. Lucas confessed to her murder and a date was set for his execution, however it was later discovered that Lucas was in Florida at the time of her murder, more evidence was soon found supporting this. In 1998 Texas Governor George Bush commuted Lucas’ death sentence to life imprisonment because of the new evidence.
Today the world rests easier knowing that Lucas has been imprisoned for life in Texas. The horrid life of a serial killer perplexes most Americans who do not understand how someone could commit such immoral acts. We may never know how many people he actually killed, hopefully Lucas may help us learn more about serial killers and eventually prevent them in the future.
Henry Lee Lucas Websites
Serial Killers
Modus Operandi
Mr. Katz's Website
Our Childhood Page
